Pinboard (robertogreco)
https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/public/
recent bookmarks from robertogrecoThe Touch of Madness - Pacific Standard2017-10-16T03:40:15+00:00
https://psmag.com/magazine/the-touch-of-madness-mental-health-schizophrenia
robertogrecoThe more there is about the individual that deviates in an undesirable direction from what might have been expected to be true of him, the more he is obliged to volunteer information about himself, even though the cost to him of candor may have increased proportionally.
What candor had Jones offered that cost her so dear? Jones, searching through the dimness of memory, has come to believe that the simplest, most likely explanation for her being barred from campus is that one particular hallucination she confessed to one person, or perhaps two or three people, got badly misunderstood."
…
"Although Jones' exile lasted but a week or two, this brief banishment, she would later record, "set in motion a chain of events that were to forever change my life, perhaps as profoundly as the 'diagnosis' of schizophrenia itself." It released a set of forces that no one understood and no one knew how to stop. And it may have done so not because Jones actually threatened violence, but because the culture around her was so ready to equate psychosis with violence that her diagnosis made her a threat. One of the questions here that comes quickest to mind—what did Jones do to provoke such a reaction?—may be a red herring. Her mere passage into psychosis may have been enough to provoke expulsion.
When Jones returned to campus after 10 days or so, she says, virtually none of her fellow students and few of the faculty would even look at her. As her classmates pulled back, Jones withdrew further. "She was just kind of gone," says Kieran Aarons, a fellow philosophy graduate student who had also known Jones as a fellow undergraduate in Oregon. "She wasn't disrupting anything, or having outbursts. But she was very clearly not in the room."
In the weeks after her return, Jones became estranged not just from Chanter but from the rest of the circle of classmates who'd formed around Chanter. She eventually lost even Erfani, with whom she hasn't talked since. Because it pained Jones to see her professors, she studied their schedules so she could time her entrances and exits from the building so as to avoid them. When that wasn't good enough, she would enter a bathroom and lock herself in a stall for long periods of time, unable to face anyone. People noticed this too.
At this point she started having disturbingly vivid visions of killing herself. She felt utterly crushed, helpless, and alone."
…
"If her exile two Aprils before had thrown Jones down a well, she now collapsed at its bottom and lay drowning. She could not think. Could not read. Could not tell who was real and who was not, what was actually happening and what she was imagining. Could not tell whether such distinctions even mattered. When she looked people in the eyes, she felt them enter her mind and read all her thoughts. She felt both formless and isolated, selfless and alone, borderless, "as if erased." For one period many days long, possibly weeks, she surrendered completely to her demons and delusions. "I didn't even get out of bed," she said later. "And when I say I didn't get out of bed, I mean I did not get out of bed. There were days I could not summon the energy, or perhaps the will, to walk from the bed to the bathroom."
In retrospect, she says, she surrendered to a dynamic she had examined in one of the last philosophy papers she managed to finish, written when things were unraveling the spring before. Fifty years earlier, the British psychotherapist Donald Winnicott had proposed that the elaborate delusional worlds that typify schizophrenia in Western cultures are not arbitrary structures of a broken, schizophrenic mind, but a complex set of mental fortifications the person builds to protect herself against the real world, which she worries will seize and lock her away because she is insane. It's madness as an Escherian stairway to hell.
Years later, Jones would find this vision a credible explanation of her own descent into madness. For a year or more after her expulsion, she often stayed in her head's delusional worlds not because she had lost her mind, but because her mind felt safer in delusion than in her ruined reality.
"Everything is on fire, in flames, burning," she wrote in her diary. "My thoughts are everywhere ... a cloud, a pack of birds, a pack of wolves.""]]>2017 daviddobbs mentalhealth psychology health culture madness nevjones japan ethiopia colombo addisababa schizophrenia society srilanka shekharsaxena philosophy perception treatment medicine psychosis media academia anthropology daniellende pauleugenbleuler emilkraepelin danielpaulschreber edwadsapir relationships therapy tinachanter namitagoswami irenehurford richardnoll ethanwatters wolfgangjilek wolfgangpfeiffer stigma banishment hallucinations really but alterations of temporality time spatiality depthperception kinesthetics memory memories reality phenomenology subjectivity consciousness donaldwinnicott alienation kinship isolation tanyaluhrmannhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0790015b0dd0/Experience: I have Alice In Wonderland syndrome | Health and wellbeing | Life and Health2008-02-20T21:23:02+00:00
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/wellbeing/story/0,,2256750,00.html
robertogrecohealth medicine oddities perception psychology sight hallucinations alicehttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a9be70ac4e83/